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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Another trip to Los Angeles

A mail sent to the group asking for what should be the weekend plan and 10 hrs later we are planning about our LA trip, to make things more interesting after a nice offsite at IFly at SF in the morning with the team and a decent dance party on the Friday evening, at 00:30 hrs after lot of rethinking the plan is finalized and it is to leave at 2:30 AM :)

Lot of sleep deprivation sounded like a bad idea for me but was against the opinion of everyone else so I decided to comply. Shreyas and I were supposed to share the drive of around 359 miles. Giving around 3 hrs per head (Yeah the average sucks because there are road which you drive at 85 MPH and others where 65 MPH is difficult). The journey in the night seemed to be easier then the day one with much less traffic, I would say an ideal time for someone to venture driving in to Freeways as Mayank did.

The journey went easier than imagined we were in Santa Monica by around 8:30 AM and within few minutes at Gundu's appartment and then continued to Universal Studios, Los Angeles spending around 90 minutes to reach the place due to traffic (fortunately not too many jams on our side). Universal Studios was certainly not my choice as I have been there already but certainly something one won't miss on their first trip. The second visit didn't turn out to be too interesting for me but others enjoyed it as much as I did on my previous visit. This time the waiting time was ~10-15 minutes for each ride compared to around 1 hr on prev visit seeming because that was a long weekend. The 7-8 hrs of time spent was enough for the covering almost everything. Universal Studios closes at 8 PM and post that you are mostly left to roam around in the shopping area around.

Our earlier plans were to visit San Diego next day but Gundu informed us about the fact that it would probably take 2 full days for a good SD visit and we decided to stick to places in Santa Monica and LA, covering the Venice and Santa Monica beaches followed by Mullholand drive watching the famous Hollywood sign and finally taking loads of photos there. The evening was spent on the Hollywood walk of fame (which turned out to be just a footpath :)) and other nearby entertainment after which we decided to watch the sunrise from Griffith Park. Griffith park turned out to be a very big location and we could only figure out the right point after the sunset :P. But we ended up reaching the Observatory which offers one of the best view of the LA city in the evening. The observatory had lot of other stuff like planetarium and some informative gallery but we had to run back and leave back for Mountain View. The drive was another night drive and took us around 7 hrs again though it was from a different path and much more curvy road.